This invention relates to an industrial robot capable of being readily installed on a machine tool.
Industrial robots have a gripping device mounted at the end of a hand which extends from the robot body. The body also accommodates control and drive devices. The gripping device is adapted to grasp a workpiece placed on a pallet and to carry the workpiece over a predetermined path to another location for example, to the chuck or a machine tool.
Since an industrial robot of the above kind is comparatively large in size, it is customary to install a single robot in the vicinity of several machine tools and have the robot service each tool. With the wider availability of industrial robots, even small-scale factories now make use of them. Since such smaller factories and plants have limited floor space, the number and kind of machine tools used are few. Thus, rather than having a single large industrial robot service a number of machine tools, a preferable arrangement is to have each machine tool serviced by a smaller robot of its own. There are also instances, even in larger factories, where higher efficiency is achieved by providing each machine tool with a less costly robot of its own. Nevertheless, the industrial robots so far developed are high in price, large in size and take up too much space, and therefore have not succeeded is meeting the above-mentioned requirements.